Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats … Tearing up the Other Voices stage at Latitude.
Photograph: Tara Thomas/Other Voices

Saturday’s lineup at Latitude hosted the soul revival play-offs. In the afternoon, Leon Bridges did his impeccably dressed spirit-of-Sam-Cooke thing to an appreciative audience (though someone should tell him that climbing into a crowd with an acoustic guitar to play a song unamplified really, really, really doesn’t work at a festival, when only the half dozen people nearest you are aware you’re even doing it). And on Saturday night, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats brought their rather more vigorous take on horns and choppy guitar upstrokes to the tiny Other Voices stage.

Leon Bridges may have had the top 10 album – and his set, sweet voiced and seductive, was perfectly enjoyable – but Rateliff was the only winner of this contest. Before the show began, the couple of well-lubricated geezers in front of me asked whether he was worth hanging around for. By the end, they told me it was far and away the best thing they’d seen all weekend.

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I saw Rateliff in his current guise at the Lexington in London a few weeks ago. It wasn’t a show I was gagging to go to. I had a memory of him as a perfectly pleasant but entirely unremarkable singer-songwriter playing a dusty kind of Americana. That, indeed, is what his first couple of albums sound like to me, on revisiting them. He must have thought that there wasn’t much point being a perfectly pleasant but entirely unremarkable singer-songwriter in a field that isn’t exactly short of people willing to open their souls over the sound of weeping steel guitars, because he’s about-faced dramatically.

There’s nothing terribly original about the Night Sweats: they combine the sound of mid-60s Stax (Caroline, which is putting out their album next month, has even revived the Stax imprint for it) with a good dose of Van Morrison’s Caledonian soul period. It’s the commitment with which they do it that’s the thing – sax and trumpet, drums, keyboards, bass and a couple of guitars mesh together with Rateliff’s gruff voice into something with the force of a locomotive. They look great, too: contrived, but beautifully so, somewhere between a chain gang and the E Street band. It’s a reminder that pop’s always been about the package, not just the songs.

But the songs are fantastic, too, and Rateliff has found himself an absolute showstopper of a finale, one that he performed at the Lexington, and which I wondered if he’d be able to pull off at Latitude. He did. And then some.

His new single, S.O.B., is a spirited three-and-a-half minutes on record. The kind of song you want to play three or four times in a row (which I did on the drive back from Suffolk). And he realises that, because on stage it becomes a party – an extended vamp that you want never to end – not least because you’re joining in. Even his band don’t seem to know quite how long to keep it going for – on Saturday, I could see his guitarist, after each stop, looking to Rateliff and making to take off his guitar, Rateliff almost imperceptibly shaking his head each time. The audience has to sing and clap along and, despite the album not being out yet, and the song only having been premiered on Guardian Music last week – they do. Both times I’ve seen him, the whole audience has joined in.

When S.O.B. finishes, Rateliff and the Night Sweats leave the stage, still singing, still clapping, leaving the audience to carry on. They return to the stage, keeping up the chant and the clap, and burst into the Band’s The Shape I’m In, and just when you think it’s all over … they burst back into S.O.B., and the audience’s legs jerk into action. You can’t help but dance. It’s the best piece of stagecraft I’ve seen in an age. It’s utterly irresistible. You might very well dig out the studio version of S.O.B. online and think it sounds like a thoroughly likeable song, but nowhere near the sell I’m giving it, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. But go to see him next time he’s over from Denver: you’ll see what I mean.

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Classic soul is on the upswing at the moment – as well as Rateliff and Bridges, there’s Curtis Harding and a score of others. Perhaps the reason they’re doing well, and feel so fresh, is that for lovers of what one might call “conservative music” – stuff that’s based around the old-fashioned virtues of melody and arrangement, rather than production and rhythm – these feel like tepid times. Guitar music feels like it’s in fairly dismal straits – you’ve got the dregs of the indie landfill, scores of Identikit mopers with acoustic guitars and their cousins, the electrified mopers who shove a few bleeps on top of their beige songs and pass it off as experimental. The soul revivalists – and someone like Ezra Furman, who also looks back to the 50s and 60s for his own extravagantly entertaining live shows – are plugging music back in to something more primal, something simpler, where how it makes your gut feel is more important than what it makes you think.

This miniature wave of 50s and 60s purism might well turn out to be a short-lived thing; we’ve had such waves before and they’ve never lasted. But they’ve often occurred at a point where rock has been getting a bit dull and up itself – think of the early 70s rock’n’roll revival, at the same time as prog and the boringly serious singer-songwriters who were clogging up the record racks. Back then, this music was striking such a chord that in 1972 Wembley Stadium could host the London Rock’n’Roll Show. If it hangs around too long, of course, this stuff gets boring in its own right: what makes the sound of soul and old rock’n’roll so exciting – that return to basics and to primal impulses – is also its greatest limitation. There isn’t really anywhere to go from trying to match Otis Redding or Chuck Berry.

For now though, this is the stuff that’s reminding me how much joy music can offer. These are the shows at which I’m feeling unselfconscious and ready to cut loose. These are the shows played by people who sound like they’re making music because it’s bursting out of them. And sometimes that, rather than something that confronts the desperate heart of modern life, is what the soul craves.